|
van Binsbergen, W.M.J., 1986, ‘Theoretical inspiration, boundaries and ethnicity: Preliminary remarks on J.F. Bayart’s approach to politics in contemporary Africa’, paper presented at a seminar with J.-F. Bayart, Department of Political and Historical Studies, African Studies Centre, Leiden, 27 October 1986
© 1986-2002 W.M.J. van Binsbergen
THEORETICAL INSPIRATION
On an epistemological and methodological
level, Bayart’s central problem appears to be far more general
and rather more profound than what is generally reserved for the
discipline of political science. In his choice of philosophical
sources of inspiration (e.g. Foucault, Bourdieu), in his adoption
of terms like ‘enunciation’ and ‘genres discursives’, it
is clear that he is struggling, in the specific field of
political analysis, with problems which others have recently
begun to explore for such fields as verbal communication (cf.
Bayart 1985: 353f), or the interpretation of ritual (where
Devisch and others are developing a ‘praxeological’ method
not unlike the one advocated by Bayart). One does not have to be
a declared adept of Foucault or Bourdieu to detect, in much of
this, a timely concern to escape from the tautological,
teleological, authoritarian and often extremely condescending
nature of the structural models of thought that have dominated
Western scholarship for centuries. Determinism, reductionism,
accepted categorisation, established canons of social and
scholarly classification, are to be discarded. We are invited to
share in a dazzling intellectual adventure:
“Le champs des
«modes populaires d’action politique» est celui de la
mobilite, de l’ambivalence, de l’allusif, du non-dit, de
l’insaissisable.” (Bayart 1981: 63)
The processes of consciousness and of action such as the subjects
of our political analysis turn out to be engaged in,
interpenetrate with one another and with our own, both as
scholars and as fellow human beings. These processes we are
invited to approach, not so much as structure but as history, not
as classification but as genesis, in an attempt at reasoned
description rather than theoretical explanation.
In such a context, politics could hardly remain one of various
clear-cut ‘levels’ or instances which together and in some
well-established hierarchical relationship, like the good old
layer-cake,[2] make up society. The
question of how politics relates to other ‘institutional
complexes’, such as ideology or the economy, may turn out to be
irrelevant and utterly misleading. In a kaleidoscopic fashion,
processes of genesis, of alliances and contradiction, instigated
and contested by real people in an eternally changing historical
context, evolve; with unpredictable outcome, they continually
reconstruct and recreate society. Calling certain aspects of
these processes political, ideological, cultural, etc., only
makes some limited sense, as long as one is prepared to admit
that the political is ideological, that culture both produces and
is produced by politics, etc.
“La politique
se definit tout d’abord par rapport a une certaine conception
de la personne out de l’individu, d’une part, de la
communaute, de l’autre.” (Bayart 1985: 364)
Perhaps depending on the extent to which one has vested interest
in the established lore of modern, U.S.A.-orientated political
science (I have virtually none), one may regret such a broad
approach to the subject — and prefer some much more limited and
comfortable definition in terms of ‘struggle for scarce
resources’ or ‘the mediation of class conflict through the
state’. However, as an analyst (anthropologist by training)
whose primary inspiration in socio-political analysis derives
from the grass-roots level of African villagers and urban poor,
and as one primarily engaged in the analysis of such aspects of
society as are habitually called ideological, I am inclined to
welcome such an approach as inspiring and liberating. Even if I
am sure to miss essential philosophical and epistemological
implications of Bayart’s evolving argument, it has managed to
reassure me that, after all, political analysis may be meaningful
and worthwhile, i.e. may be capable of existentially relating to
the processes of consciousness and social action of the people I
have done field-work among and associate with, mostly at the far
geographical and interactional periphery of the modern
post-colonial state.
BOUNDARIES
Like all human creation, modern scholarship
is both innovative and accumulative. A new paradigm may — for
some years at least — release us from the limitations and
distortions of earlier modes of analysis — but it should yet
enable us to safeguard whatever may have been valuable in earlier
work, even if that happened to be cast in a different (and now
hopelessly dated) idiom.
How to both create, and transgress or negotiate, boundaries
between the old and the new? There is the modern Africanist’s
task for you.
And there is also, in much the same way, the task of every modern
African, situated as he or she is, somewhere between the exercise
of state power in all its formal bureaucratic trappings, and the
pursuit of village and family affairs in an idiom only very
partially shaped and even less controlled by the postcolonial
state.
Entrenching himself firmly behind the boundary of his new
emerging paradigm (and not too concerned with negotiating that
boundary or helping others — still pathetically clutching the
remnants of faded earlier paradigms — to negotiate it), Bayart
energetically rejects (1985: 344) the many approaches to
contemporary African society that are based on a variety of
dualism — and that, by the same token, imply some pre-existing
structural ordering, often with strongly vertical implications.
Strategies of hegemony formation permeate the entire (and
expanding) social field and create cross-linkages. The most
successful politician is the one who manages to strike the
quasi-historic compromise between the various cross-cutting
processes of domination — and the Cameroonian state emerges
largely as a result of that compromise:
“...l’hypothese
centrale de cet ouvrage, selon laquelle la recherche hegemonique
au Cameroun repose sur l’assimilation reciproque des differents
segments de l’elite sociale d’origine precoloniale, coloniale
et postcoloniale, qu’elle consiste en un compromis que l’on
pourrait qualifier d’historique (...)” (Bayart 1979: 280).
Bayart does not deny the heterogeneity of the socio-political
material out of which the postcolonial state emerges. Previous
analyses have stressed the discrete nature of these elements, and
have sought to define (in terms of a distinction between modern
and tradition, urban and rural, capitalist and domestic, literate
and illiterate, etc. etc.) that heterogeneity in general
structural terms. In Bayart’s analysis however stress is laid
not on the boundaries between what in other idiom might have been
called sub-systems, nor on the empirical historical and
sociological analysis of these ‘sub-systems’, but the
negotiability and permeability of these boundaries — to the
extent perhaps of them totally fading from the analytical scene.
In essence, his view of the hegemonic process is transactional in
the sense of the transactionalist anthropology that emerged
primarily in Great-Britain since the 1960s (the Manchester School
with such protagonists as Mitchell, van Velsen, Turner; Barth;
Bailey; Boissevain), with emphasis on networks, manipulation, the
primacy of dynamic interaction as continually overriding and
recreating more enduring socio-political structure, etc. There
seem to be no other than strategic and logistic limits to the
range of the hegemonic process — and certainly nothing in the
way of a qualitative rupture, a ‘quantum jump’, and hence a
boundary, between the domain of modern politics, and other
aspects of contemporary African society, including e.g.
neo-traditional politics at the village level, hunting ritual, or
Christian assemblies.[3]
Much like in Barth’s (1966) analysis of cultural brokerage, the
essential feature of the politician is to mediate and to bridge,
not only with regard to scarce resources including state
privileges, but particularly with regard to ideological and
cultural aspects of modern society:
“Des lors, la
problematique du passage au politique conduit a l’analyse des
mediations par lesquelles des repertoires culturels obtiennent
leur validite au regard de l’Etat contemporain.” (Bayart
1985: 371)
At first, I was under the impression that
Bayart’s transactional orientation led him to underplay
ideological elements. The opposite now turns out to be true, but
it remains difficult to relate his approach to more system- and
structure-orientated approaches to culture and ideology in modern
Africa, and particularly those that explore in detail the
underlying heterogeneity, rather than the way in which that
heterogeneity is partly dissolved in the course of the hegemonic
project Bayart evokes so convincingly.
ETHNICITY
One important cluster of such approaches,
stressing fundamental discreteness and boundaries between
qualitatively different social subgroups, rather than hegemonic
coagulation, revolves on the concept of ethnicity.
The notion that ethnic allegiance is based on some pre-colonial
past and the primordial attachments somehow generated by that
past, has now largely been discarded. All over Africa scholars
have exposed the ‘myth of tribe’ as largely a result of
colonial and post-colonial incorporation processes, within which
also the anthropological enterprise itself has played a
problematic role (e.g. van Binsbergen 1985a and references cited
there).
What strikes one in L‘Etat au Cameroun is Bayart’s
reluctance to discuss the ethnic dimension of a hegemonic process
which, among other actors, encompasses actors whose political
role is partly defined in the context of ethnic consciousness,
the social groups and categories perceived in that context, and
the ensuing neo-traditional positions of leadership (chiefs,
notables, elders) and ‘followingship’. Perhaps this puzzling
omission was merely a matter of the presentational dynamics of
his evolving argument. Recently, Bayart has made an effort to
address the matter more explicitly. His dismissal of the ethnic
element in modern Cameroonian politics brings to bear all the now
familiar tenets of modern ethnicity studies:
“Mais a quoi
bon multiplier des exemples, tant il est clair que les
identifications ethno-regionales representent l’un des pivots
de la conscience politiques des Camerounais? Pourtant, il etait
profondement errone d’y reduire la crise de 1983-1984.
Rappelons tout d’abord que l’ethnie, au moins telle que se la
represente l’Europeen, sous la forme d’une entite donnee,
homogene et correspondant a un terroir delimite, n’existe sans
doute pas. La demonstration en a ete tres tot apportee a propos
du Cameroun, avant meme que le debat ne prenne en France la
tournure que l’on sait (7) [footnote reference to collections
edited by Tardits and Boutrais — WvB]. A l’instar de toutes
les identifications culturelles, la conscience ethnique est
contextuelle. En outre, elle n’est pas exclusive
d’identifications complementaires ou concurrentes, telle que
les identifications a des lignes de differenciation ancestrales
ou nees de la division moderne du travail, ou encore a des
ensembles culturels supra-ethniques d’ordre religieux ou
national. La conscience ethnique vehicule ainsi des
representations autres «qu’etniques», qui interdisent de
reduire les affrontements de ce type a de simples conflits
desincarnes d’identification. Y sont egalement en jeu des
interets politiques, religieux, economiques. De plus, phenomene
complexe et relatif, l’ethnicite n’est pas une structure
statique et a-temporelle. Les rapports interethniques sont des
produits de l’histoire et non une combinatoire stable
d’invariants. Or les commentateurs etrangers de l’actualite
camerounaise se rabattirent sur un type d’explication encore
plus grossier, privilegiant la dichotomie entre le «Nord» et le
«Sud», sans voir qu’aucun des termes de ce binome n’etait
homogene.
(...) Quant aux Kirdi, ils representent une mosaique d’ethnies
tres diverses, dont l’insertion dans le systeme regional
d’inegalite et de domination varie d’un groupe a l’autre et
qui sont elles-meme parcourues par des clivages profonds. Ce qui
pose probleme et interdit de bien comprendre le fond des choses,
c’est une fois de plus, en definitive, cette notion
passe-partout d’ethnie. Les precieux travaux de Mohammadou
Eldridge demontrent que nous sommes en presence de constructions
historiques nullement homogenes de ce point de vue et dont le
ressort est tres classiquement politique, militaire out
economique, avant d’etre «tribal». (...) Bien qu’il eut
assure son ascension contre le gre des principaux lamidats de la
region, qu’il leur eut impose la creation d’un parti
politique de conception occidentale et qu’il eut restreint leur
prerogatives des les premieres annees de son regime, M. Ahidjo
avait poursuive bon an mal an cette strategie jusqu’au moment
de sa demission.(...)
La moitie Sud du pays ne presente pas une configuration plus
simple. (...) c’est bien, en conclusion, cette notion de
terroir qui doit prevaloir [over that of ethnic identity - WvB],
au Cameroun comme dans le reste de l’Afrique, si l’on veut
comprendre l’historicite de l’Etat et du politique. Nul
exotisme dans ce constat.” [follows a reference to Braudel on
the French nation — WvB] (Bayart 1986: 8-11)
More seems involved however, in Bayart’s
dismissal, than the accumulated wisdom of modern students of
ethnicity: its recent emergence as a cultural construct, its
situational nature, its lack of consistence, etc. His
appreciation of this immensely important aspect of the
contemporary African scene (also in Cameroon) remains somewhat
sketchy, though not uninteresting:
“A tous les
niveaux de celle-ci [la societe camerounaise — WvB], les «sans
importance» opposent aux consignes et aux objectifs des
autorites une impermeabilite assez remarquable, sur la nature de
laquelle le discours ideologique du regime ne doit pas induire en
erreur. Ce qui est etiquete comme «paresse», «superstition»,
«tribalisme» est refus, plus ou moins conscient, car plus ou
moins culpabilise par les admonestations officielles, d’un
modele de developpement economique et politique.” (Bayart 1979:
267)
Here once again the tendency to take the
modern state as the unique point of departure. Bayart has very
strongly and with numerous repetitions stressed the historicity
of the modern African state, and flatly refused to look at it as
an exogenous and superficially implanted phenomenon; e.g.:
“La premiere
erreur du Parti socialiste consista a exagerer la nature exogene
des Etats africains, comformement a la vulgate dependantiste, et
a laisser ainsi echapper l’irreductibilite de leur historicite
politique (...) La seconde erreur (...) fut de tenir pour
quantite negligeable les entreprises quoiqu’elles detinssent
[sic] dans une large mesure la clef des relations
franco-africaines.” (Bayart 1984: 127, 130)
But to accept[4] such
historicity (implying that the post-colonial African state should
be analysed in its own right and taken seriously as an integral,
central aspect of modern African society), does not necessarily
mean that one has to deny all other, perhaps equally integral and
central, sources or clusters of societal structuration — for
instance, those that, in the form of ethnicity, revolve on the
consciousness of a shared past within a regional, sub-national
socio-political space.
Is it possible that part of Bayart’s reluctance to address the
nature and political implications of ethnicity stems from his
refusal, on analytical grounds (the rejection of dualism in all
its forms, the vulgate, perhaps, — to use a darling expression
of his — of unboundedness and unlimited accessibility for the
hegemonic exercise?), to allow for other more or less autonomous
fields of socio-political crystallisation of structure, outside
and beyond, perhaps even prior to, the modern state?
This is not to deny that within the context of the hegemonic
process as associated with the modern state, an explicit notion
of traditional culture is engineered and manipulated — in
Cameroon, in the Dutch Parliament (where recently Minister of
Social Services Brinkman called for a return to traditional
values of neighbourly assistance to compensate for state
withdrawal...), in the South African ideology of Apartheid, etc.
Even popular culture (of which ethnic consciousness could perhaps
be regarded one conspicuous form) is subject to such hegemonic
manipulation:
‘...une culture
est historique avant d’etre «culturelle». Elle n’est pas
reservoir de representations constantes, existant d’une facon
objective en tant qu’africanite (par exemple), mais
reactualisation permanente de ces representations dans le
contexte d’une situation historique donnee, c’est-a-dire, si
l’on s’en tient a la culture dite populaire, redefinition
perpetuelle par rapport aux groupes sociaux dominants
(7)[footnote reference to Hurbon - WvB].(...)
Dans le cas de l’Afrique, il est d’autant plus important de
refuter l’idee d’un corpus culturel populaire (...). Sous sa
forme ethnologique, elle a conduit a l’ethnophilosophie, selon
laquelle il y aurait unicite culturelle en Afrique (la negritude)
(...) [, notion qui] participe directement du debat politique,
dans des sens contradictoires: formulees en termes
«d’authenticite», elle contribue a etayer l’autonomie des
groupes dirigeants africains par rapport au «centre»
occidental, mais aussi a asseoir ideologiquement leur domination
nationale” (Bayart 1981: 57-58)
Yet one continues to wonder how much of a
more or less independent ethnic factor would remain discernible
to those who are prepared to look for it outside the modern
state.
In profound ways to which my present short argument cannot do
justice,[5] Geschiere (e.g. 1986)
has sought to further develop Bayart’s approach — both by
theoretical analysis, and by applying it a grassroots situation
(the Maka of S.E. Cameroon) on which his prolonged field-work has
offered him an intimate view such as few political scientist
working from the national level could ever hope to acquire. In
this connexion, Geschiere stresses the importance of regional
variation within the unitary hegemonic project (Geschiere 1986:
323f) — but although this would seem to invite an analysis in
terms of ethnicity, he has not yet provided one in detail
(however, cf. Geschiere 1986: 323, 334f).
Barbier (1981: 132ff) touches on the same topic when, in his
critical reflection on L’Etat au Cameroun, he argues that the
complex dynamics of the Bamileke political situation (including
the U.P.C. episode) could at best only partly be understood under
the heading of Bayart’s opposition between ‘aines’ and
‘cadets’. But even so, ethnicity in itself offers no adequate
alternative explanation:
‘On peut se
demander en consequence si l’U.P.C. eut un tel impact en pays
bamileke (...) simplement parce qu’elle avait su, la premiere,
deborder le cadre ethnique pour regrouper les principaux groupes
de la region de Douala (Dwala, Bamileke, Basaa) et apparaitre
comme etant la plus capable d’assumer le cadre national qui se
profilait au terme de la decolonisation?” (Barbier 1981: 135)
Yet the ethnic factor has continued to
remain puzzlingly relevant in this context:
“Depuis la
crise des annees soixante, les chefferies bamileke retrouvent un
second souffle en se reorganisant autour d’une alliance entre
les detenteurs du pouvoir traditionnel (chefs et notables) et
certains emigres qui, ayant reussi dans leurs activites
economiques, aspirent a une consecration sociale dans leur milieu
d’origine en recevant un titre de notabilite. (...) dans le cas
bamileke, ces processus se realisent en dehors d’un quelconque
appareil politique” [as defined in modern national politics -
WvB] (Barbier 1981:135f)
It does not really help to redefine the
problems of analysis that arise here, from ethnic to territorial
or geographical terms, as Bayart seems to contemplate. Of course,
the clustering and intersection of processes of interaction,
communication and conceptualisation within a limited geographical
area, as well as the parcelling up of the African landscape by
colonial and post-colonial administrative divisions with all its
political and economic consequences, forms a very important context
for the rise of ethnicity.[6] But once it has
emerged, the consciousness it generates, whether we call it
ethnic or territorial, sectional, sub-national or regional, is
never easily to be explained away by reference to the modern
state. Moreover it seems to reintroduce notions of boundedness
and boundaries (be they even administrative and geographic) whose
specific effects on the hegemonic process might be fruitfully
analysed.
CONCLUSION
New paradigms may release us from earlier
limitations, but they also have the tendency to impose a new sort
of orthodoxy on the analyst. Bayart’s approach certainly throws
new light on the processes and strategies by which idioms and what
he calls ‘genres discursives’[7] which do not directly
emanate from the modern state, are drawn into the overall
political process at the national and regional level in many
African countries, but it remains unclear where the boundaries
lie of the paradigm — and of the hegemonic process it seeks to
describe. Is this simply a matter of lack of understanding and
philosophical sophistication in my part, or is there a genuine
theoretical question here? Is there a limit to the manipulation
and brokerage of the hegemonic endeavour? Is the process fed
perhaps from other sources than the modern state alone — or has
the contemporary world-wide scale of social construction (cf.
mass media, the increasingly intercontinental and international
context of regional and national political processes, the
continuing penetration of the capitalist mode of production) now
destroyed any such niches and refuges, or at least imposed total
control upon them (it does not sound likely)? If not, can we
explore those sources, do they include something that is not a
creation of the modern state and that would be described in terms
of ethnic analysis?[8] And does the fact
that our own method, and our own professional world as European
Africanists (cf. van Binsbergen 1984), are so very much defined
within the context of the modern state and its logic, not
preclude any real insight on these points?
REFERENCES
Barbier, J.-C.
1981
‘Alliance ou conflit entre le haut ou le bas?’, rubrique “A
livre ouvert: L’Etat au Cameroun de J.-F. Bayart”, Politique
africaine, 1, 1, janvier 1981: 130-37.
Barth,
F.
1966
Barth, F., 1966, Models of social organization, Londen: Royal
Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland,
Occasional Papers no. 23.
Bayart,
J.-F.
1979
L’Etat au Cameroun, Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale
des sciences politiques, first edition (the second edition, of
1984, has been used here).
1981
‘Le politique par le bas en Afrique noire: Questions de
methode’, Politique africaine, 1, 1, janvier 1981: 53-82.
1984
La politique africaine de Francois Mitterand: Essai, Paris:
Karthala.
1985
‘L’Enonciation du politique’, in: Passage au Politique,
special issue of Revue francaise de science politique, 35, 3:
343-73.
1986
‘La societe politique camerounaise (1982-1986)’, Politique
africaine, 22, juin 1986: 5-35.
n.d.
(1986) Oral presentation, African
Colloquium, Netherlands African Studies Association & African
Studies Centre, Leiden, 24 October 1986.
Faure,
Y.-A.
1981
‘Croissance etatique et accumulation... des obstacles’,
rubrique “A livre ouvert: L‘Etat au Cameroun de J.-F.
Bayart”, Politique africaine, 1, 1, janvier 1981: 128-30.
Geschiere,
P.
1986a
‘Paysans, regime national et recherche hegemonique:
L’implantation de l’U(N)C, le «Grand Parti National», dans
les villages maka’, Politique africaine, 22, juin 1986: 73-100.
1986b
‘Hegemonic regimes and popular protest — Bayart, Gramsci and
the state in Cameroon’, in van Binsbergen et al. 1986a: 309-47.
van
Binsbergen, W.M.J.
1984
‘Can anthropology become the theory of peripheral class
struggle? Reflexions on the work of P.P. Rey’, in: W.M.J. van
Binsbergen & G.S.C.M. Hesseling (eds.), Aspecten van staat en
maatschappij in Afrika: Recent Dutch and Belgian research on the
African state, Leiden: African Studies Centre, pp. 163-80.
1985a
‘From tribe to ethnicity in Western Zambia: The unit of study
as an ideological problem’, in: W.M.J. van Binsbergen & P.
Geschiere (eds), Old modes of production and capitalist
encroachment, London/Boston: Kegan Paul International, pp.
181-234.
1985b
‘Political organization and the Lozi/Tonga frontier in Central
Western Zambia’, paper, Africa Colloquium, Netherlands African
Studies Association, November 1985; revised version to be
included as chapter 5 in my forthcoming monograph, Tears of Rain:
The Nkoya Experience 1900-1978.
1986
‘The post-colonial state, “state penetration” and the Nkoya
experience in Central Western Zambia’, in van Binsbergen et al.
1986a: 31-63.
van
Binsbergen, W.M.J., F. Reijntjens & G.S.C.M. Hesseling
1986a
(eds) State & Local Community in Africa/Etat et communaute
locale en Afrique, Les Cahiers du CEDAF Cahier 2-3-4, Serie 2,
Brussels: Centre d’Etude et de Documentation africaines.
1986b
‘Aspects of modern state penetration in Africa’, in van
Binsbergen et al. 1986a: 369-400.
[1]This paper was
prepared for a seminar with J.-F. Bayart at the Department of
Political and Historical Studies, African Studies Centre, Leiden,
27 October 1986. Rather than offering an argument, it provides
the materials for a future argument — including extensive
quotations and bibliographic references which are ‘notes for
further use’; least of all should the latter imply that I see
the analysts’s task primarily as compilatory! This hastily
written draft paper is not to be cited or quoted without my
consent.
[2]
But what about its glacial counterpart, cassata: the Napolitan
variety of layered icecream — cf Bayart 1985: 346...?
[3] The
fundamental nature of the boundary problem in the appreciation of
Bayart’s work is also hinted at in the following observation by
Faure:
“Bayart a raison d’insister sur l’etroite liaison
des ressources publiques et privees dans le processus de
formation d’une classe dominante camerounaise. L’Etat
postcolonial sert precisement de creuset a cette dynamique
sociale en favorisant l’interpenetration des positions de
pouvoir (bureaucratie) et de richesse (economie). (...) Il est
des lors logique de presenter l’absence de frontieres entre le
domaine public et le domaine prive comme participant de
l’essence meme du regime politique. Les faits de detournement
des ressources publiques a des fins personelles, que certains
designent comme la neo-patrimonialisation de l’Etat africain,
que d’autres nomment corruption en la circonscrivant bien a
tort a son aspect penal, illustrent parfaitement le processus
d’accumulation qui se joue a l’ombre des structures
politiques modernes. Mais Bayart, tout en restaurant la
signification sociologique de ces phenomenes trop souvent percus
commes des signes de pathologie politique, me parait laisser de
cote un aspect important de la question: jusqu’a quel point le
franchissement des frontieres entre le public et le prive
n’est-il pas prejudiciable aux objectifs de l’Etat?” (Faure
1981: 129)
However, instead of the state-centredness of Faure’s
final sentence one would wish to investigate the genesis and the
conditions of reproduction for the boundary he so rightly
invokes.
[4]
Again, this is no longer a contentious position in African
studies, at least not outside France; cf. van Binsbergen et al.
1986: 372f, 390f; and for a case-study, van Binsbergen 1986.
[5]
Meanwhile, Geschiere’s approach remains sufficiently close to
Bayart’s to allow us to apply the following characterization
— meant as a positive assessment, to be sure — to the work of
both:
‘[his] insights are heuristic and methodological
rather than that their concrete substance is yet capable of
generalization: the specific features of the field at a given
time and place can lead to totally different outcomes — and, as
in other domains of African studies today, the methods of
anthropology gradually give way to those of an
anthropologically-enlightened contemporary history.’ (van
Binsbergen et al. 1986b: 385)
[6]
For a study of the emergence and juxtaposition of ethnic
identities by the super-imposition of various economic and
administrative boundaries since ca. 1850, cf. van Binsbergen
1985b.
[7]
As situationally optional forms of expression and mobilization at
the disposal of the political actors in contemporary Africa,
Bayart distinguishes, among others, the discursive domains of:
Western institutions and social forms; Marxism-Leninism;
Christianity; local traditions of statehood (which would be a
proper heading to discuss ethnicity at length!); etc. Bayart’s
approach explains the coming together of these genres as part of
the hegemonic process, but not their specific relations with
actual social groups in society, nor their historical
discreteness on the basis of a different genesis in different
parts of the world. Is the boundary of his paradigm then simply a
matter of specialization between scholarly discipines?
[8]
E.g., Bayart’s notion of ‘regional victors’ refers to a
phenomenon which is wide-spread in modern Africa, but which yet
seems to be partly informed, at least in the popular
consciousness and at least in Zambia, by precolonial military
confrontations, filed in the popular consciousness not through
the modern state but through joking relationships, e.g. between
Bemba and Ngoni.
page last modified: 20-04-13 12:24:34 | ||||